“Project Sand”: Cursor is working on Cowork competitor

Cursor, the coding tool used across much of the Fortune 500, is quietly building a general-purpose AI agent for people who never touch code. Eloise Jones reports for TechTimes that the project, internally codenamed Sand, began rolling out to Cursor employees in late June, running on infrastructure leased from SpaceXAI. Sand is designed to answer emails, organize spreadsheets and handle office tasks far beyond software engineering.

The timing matters. SpaceX agreed in June to buy Cursor’s parent company, Anysphere, for $60 billion, a deal expected to close in the third quarter of 2026. Whether Sand ever reaches the public may not be Cursor’s decision alone.

A crowded race for office work

Sand emerges into a market that filled up fast. Anthropic expanded Claude Cowork to mobile and web on July 7. OpenAI launched ChatGPT Work two days later, powered by GPT-5.6. Cursor’s potential edge lies in its Model Context Protocol integrations with tools like Vercel, GitHub and Cloudflare, which could let users move from drafting content to publishing it without switching apps.

The bigger question concerns models, not features. SpaceX also owns xAI, maker of Grok, which posted a $6.35 billion loss in 2025. Analysts cited in the report warn that Cursor’s long-standing model neutrality, letting users choose between Claude, GPT or Grok, could erode after the merger. Cursor’s data has already fed Grok’s training pipeline, the report notes, even before the deal has closed.